Clambia shuttle fragments will become museum exhibits

The fragments of the reusable spacecraft of Columbia, who had a disaster, can become exhibits of a permanent exhibition in Washington and part of the monuments in various US states.

Informal negotiations on the organization of such an exposition with NASA are, in particular, the National Aerospace Museum in Washington.

In addition, several cities sent a request to the American space department to provide them with fragments to create memorials in memory of 7 dead astronauts - 6 Americans and Israeli Ilana Ramon, ITAR -TASS reports.

Currently, about 84 thousand fragments of Columbia are in the hangar in the Kennedy space center at Cape Kanveral (Florida). The wreckage will remain there at least until the end of August, when the commission investigating the circumstances of the tragedy must submit an official conclusion about the causes of the disaster.

Nevertheless, the decision on the future fate of the shuttle fragments can be made already at the end of this month. In addition to exhibition and memorial projects, part of the debris will be provided to specialized educational institutions and research centers.

Recall that at the end of June, American experts, investigating the circumstances of the death of the Columbia spacecraft, determined the "most probable cause" of this tragedy.

According to a member of the independent commission, Roger Tetrolet, the disaster occurred due to the fact that a piece of the insulating coating of the external fuel tank broke away during a shuttle rush and, hitting the left wing, damaged the tiles of the heat-protective layer.

A few days later, on February 1, when the ship returned to the ground and passed through the dense layers of the atmosphere, hot gases that melted the internal metal structures of the left wing burst into the formed gap. This led to the rapid destruction of the entire Columbia building and the deaths of seven astronauts.

Serious suspicions that events developed precisely according to such a scenario existed before, and now experts almost have no doubt about this. Tetrolet noted that the commission came to this conclusion on the basis of studying the wreckage of shuttle, collected in the territory of several states, and experiments that allowed to simulate the circumstances of the tragedy.

Experts continue experiments in the NASA Research Center in San Antonio (Texas). The chairman of the commission Admiral Harold Geman said that her final report would be published by the end of July.